The Star Side of Bird Hill (14 page)

Phaedra tried to reconcile what she knew of her mother and her sister and Mrs. Loving's son Trevor with who they had
been back then. It was easy to imagine movement comforting her sister, because even now, Dionne seemed most happy when she wasn't still.

“When we were pregnant, we did everything together. We said that if we had a boy and a girl, they would marry one day. Nobody could tear us apart from one another, you know. When Avril came to tell me she was leaving, I put on one piece of crying and carrying on. I didn't think I could make it in this place without her. And in a way, I didn't.” Mrs. Loving gathered her dress between her thighs and turned the volume up on her cassette player in a way that indicated to Phaedra that their conversation was over.

Phaedra started to walk away, hearing this song and carrying away some part of Mrs. Loving's sorrow: “This train is bound to glory/ This train don't carry no unholy . . .”

But some part of Phaedra was unhinged by Mrs. Loving's stories. When she reached the last step of the gallery, she turned back.

“Mrs. Loving, have you ever thought about what would happen if someone you loved also loved someone else?”

“Oh, darling. Aren't you a little young to be worrying your head with that sort of thing? I know that you're all that Christopher talks about.” Mrs. Loving said these words wistfully, as if she wished she could borrow some of the shine her son reserved for Phaedra.

Phaedra trembled with what was beating its way from her belly and up out of her throat. Ever since she'd helped her grandmother deliver Donna's mother's baby boy, she couldn't
get the image of Father Loving and his lit cigarette burning up the darkness out of her head. “You don't wonder where Father Loving goes at nighttime?”

“Dear heart,” Mrs. Loving said, looking down to the valley below and the sea beyond it, “when night comes, I have my music and my boys and that is enough.”

A new song was on now, with different words, but the same guitar strains and drumroll. Mrs. Loving turned up the music and started humming along in a mournful tone that swept Phaedra off the veranda and onto the road.

F
OR ALL OF
DIONNE'S ROMPS
inside the Bird Hill cemetery that summer, when the day of her mother's funeral came, all the resources previously at her disposal—humor, indifference, denial—abandoned her, and there was no place to escape from her mother's body and the people who had gathered to see her home. Trevor stood across from her with his face so filled with mourning you would have thought it was his own mother being buried and not Avril. As the minutes stretched with Father Loving's prayers and the hill women's graveside songs, Trevor tried to catch Dionne's eye. She glanced at him briefly and noticed for the first time the way that his hairline peaked in the center of his forehead like his father and his younger brother; the intensity of their resemblance mocked her grief. For years, Dionne had looked to her mother for clues as to what she would look like when she got older. It was hard
to imagine what kind of woman she would be without the road map of her mother's body to guide her. Dionne denied Trevor the gift of her gaze.

It wasn't until she saw the coffin being lowered into the ground that the fact that her mother was not coming back, not in some undefined “soon” as Avril pointed to in her letters, not next week or the week after, not when summer was over, not before school in the States started, not ever, became clear to Dionne. Dionne's eyes had been dry since her mother died and where she'd expected to cry at the graveside, she felt instead an insistent fire at her heels and then an urge stronger than any she'd ever felt before to see her mother's face. All the anger at her mother that Dionne had been holding back her whole life rushed to her throat and threatened to choke her. This last leaving was too much. Dionne thought that if she could just see Avril's face, she'd be able to tell her that she couldn't leave, not yet.

Dionne lunged from where she stood with her arms around Phaedra, her sister's tears traveling between the black lace eyelets of Dionne's dress and pressing against her skin. She strode toward the grave's open mouth. And the hill women, the same ushers she'd seen wave fans at the brows of enraptured women, hold down grown men as they spoke the unintelligible, terrible words that God threw down on them like lightning, they came for her. She'd never known these strong arms herself. But now Mrs. Jeremiah's sinewy forearms wrapped around her midsection and pulled her back. Mrs. Gumbs's bosom and belly engulfed her. The women said things she couldn't understand,
things she knew were meant to calm her and keep her safe inside their embrace. And then, she wasn't sure how, exactly, Dionne was beside her grandmother and her sister, at the edge of her mother's grave. And before she knew what her body was doing, her feet were making contact with the wreath of lilies on Avril's coffin. There was a gasp as the hill women watched a group of men, including Trevor, drag Dionne up and out of the grave.

The men pulled her to solid ground, and then Dionne felt the women's fearsome power gather around her, but she wasn't fighting anymore. She fell back into them, wishing they could take her anger from her, because it was heavy, what she felt, her rage at Avril for abandoning them in this godforsaken place with a grandmother they barely knew. It seemed unfair that Avril should have it so easy, that she could die and leave them behind just like that. Dionne fell back into the stalwart arms of the hill women who held her. And it was either Dionne's feet or theirs that led her back to Hyacinth's house for the wake.

When the last mourners had taken their plates of wrapped food and said their good-byes, once Phaedra was asleep, it was just Hyacinth and Dionne sitting in the front room, leaning together into the night, which felt darker now because it lacked the comfort of the other hill women's company. Hyacinth asked Dionne what on earth had come over her to make her want to climb on top of Avril's coffin. And Dionne, of whom Hyacinth would say after this conversation that she was her mother's own child, said, “What I did was nothing worse than what my mother's done to me. If I had been able to see her
even once before she died, I would have told her that she shouldn't get off that easy.” Hyacinth looked at this child, at her flinty eyes, and saw how much she believed that she was not only right, but also justified. And she knew that this was the thing that would harm Dionne in the end, not her foolishness but the foolhardy way in which she clung to her own terrible ideas. She knew that this was Avril's undoing, not that she'd made the wrong choices, but that she'd been so unwilling to let anyone in to see the lie of her marriage; this masking was worse than the original mistake. Sixty-three years on this earth had taught Hyacinth that it wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out. It was the women who held too tightly to the dream of their husband's fidelity who unraveled, the parents who clasped their children too close who lost them, the men who grieved too deeply the lives they'd wanted and would never have who saw their sadness consume them. Hyacinth worried about Dionne because of her hard way of being in the world, the way she could only see the world through the lens of her own flawed feelings.

FOR THE ENTIRE NINE NIGHTS
that the hill mourned Avril, Phaedra and Dionne and Hyacinth were together almost every minute of every day. The girls and their grandmother formed a web between them that they wanted to believe was indestructible. They ate food their neighbors cooked for them and wiled the days away in prayer. On the last night, they took long soaks beneath moonlight in baths filled with bark and berries. They tried to build a new alliance with stories about Avril. Hyacinth, who was known less for her stories than for her carefully chosen words that awed with their precision, dug back into her vault of memories from the time when she herself was young and a mother, trying to reconcile what she thought motherhood might be with the reality of her sweet, impulsive child.

Phaedra and Dionne listened as Hyacinth told them about
the time their mother had driven with the church all the way out to Folkestone for the church picnic, singing hymns and shaking tambourines the whole way. After everyone had had their fill of food, Avril and Mrs. Loving rushed out in the cold water and did headstands on the seafloor, their gangly limbs kicking up above the water, and the skirts of their dresses falling down around their necks so that all the church people could see their puffy bloomers and their legs waving above them. Hyacinth had barely recovered from the embarrassment of that incident when Avril brought home Errol. He said he was a musician, and Hyacinth knew that meant he was definitely a layabout and possibly a criminal. Dionne perked up when she heard her father's name and she asked Hyacinth what he looked like when she met him.

“Well, when your mother dragged that young man in here, I could see from the way she looked at him like he was a bowl of milk and she was the hungriest cat that nothing good would come of them. I wondered to myself what would dead them first, his dreaming or her faith in him. He was wearing a cream linen suit and he had pretty pretty pretty hazel eyes and red-red skin. But I could see it was his mouth, the same mouth you have, that your mother fell in love with.”

The girls went to sleep that night with this image of their father in their minds. The next morning, Phaedra woke up upset. After her mother died, Phaedra couldn't remember her dreams. Regardless of what the dreams were about, they left their mark on her and it was not unusual for Phaedra to wake up shaken, her clothes plastered against her skin. She had
taken to crawling into Dionne's bed in the early hours of the morning, which she said was because she thought Dionne might be lonely. Now, she clung to Dionne like a life jacket.

“Dress over nuh, man. You squeezing me up too tight.” Dionne pried away Phaedra's fingers, which were fastened in a vise grip around her neck. Phaedra wiped the sleep out of her eyes and looked at her sister, who had wrapped her straightened hair into a kind of tornado around her head, and then tied it down with a scarf to keep it fresh, a trick she'd learned from Saranne.

“Daddy's coming to see about us,” Dionne said, looking, as she often was, into the mirror next to her bed. She searched her plump, pink lips for signs of her father, but all she could see was Avril.

“What?” Phaedra said. She sat up in Dionne's bed and looked from her sister's beehive to the fuzz of hair above her own two-week-old braids, which her grandmother hadn't insisted on redoing. There was a new softness in Hyacinth since her mother died. Phaedra knew that she got her way more often with her grandmother and the other hill women because of her dead mother. She only hoped this new reprieve from hardness would last.

“What are you talking about?”

“I said Daddy's going to come look for us.”

“How do you know that? Who told you?”

“I can just feel it.”

“I thought you didn't believe in all that mumbo-jumbo hocus-pocus old-wife-tale business.”

“Doesn't matter what I believe in or not. Certain things you just know.” Dionne whipped her silk bathrobe around her, yet another thing she'd gotten from Saranne and kept instead of returning it like Hyacinth had told her to. She flicked on the overhead light and Phaedra groaned.

“Besides, do you really think that if Daddy knew Mommy had died, he would just leave us here?” Dionne continued.

“I don't know, Dionne. Maybe he doesn't even know what happened. It has been a long time since we've seen him.”

“You just watch. I know that Daddy wouldn't leave us like that.”

“OK, D.,” Phaedra said. She sat a while longer watching her sister fuss with the lotions and potions on her vanity, and then she started to burrow beneath the covers.

“What are you doing?” Dionne asked.

“Going back to sleep,” Phaedra said.

“Last time I checked, you had a bed down the hall.”

“Fine, then.” Phaedra stalked out of the room, and then came back to retrieve the bandana that had fallen off her head during the night.

More than an hour later, after Phaedra heard her sister slapping her soles on the linoleum tiles on her way back and forth to the bathroom, Dionne emerged in the front room where Phaedra was eating breakfast in front of the television. Dionne was wearing a tight tube top, a denim miniskirt, Keds, and a pair of leg warmers in the same neon pink as her top.

“How do I look?” Dionne asked.

“Very, very done.” Phaedra noted the lip gloss and liner her
sister was wearing in a shade of gold that made her mouth pop out from her face like a billboard. “You're not going to VBS?”

“Nope. Me and Saranne have plans for the day.”

“But today's the last day of rehearsals and you're in one of the plays. How are you going to miss that?”

“Let me worry about that. If Granny comes home before you leave, just tell her I had to go early for rehearsal.”

“OK,” Phaedra said, unsure that she would lie if the time came.

“Love you,” Dionne said on her way out the door.

“Love you back,” Phaedra said. Ever since Avril died, they had started saying, “I love you.” This time, though, it felt like a
bribe.

AFTER
AVRIL DIED,
Hyacinth ran out of reasons why Phaedra couldn't pierce her ears. Phaedra insisted that she needed it done because she had the VBS play coming up and she wanted to wear earrings. Since she was playing a woman, Martha, in the play, it followed that her look should be a little bit more grown up. Really, what Phaedra wanted was to perm her hair so that she could start school with her hair flouncing down her back. At her old school in Brooklyn, the other girls' mothers had said they could straighten their hair for fifth-grade graduation. But Hyacinth shut Phaedra down early on in the summer, saying that if her hair was to be straightened, that was something her mother should decide. Because Dionne's hair had been relaxed before she came to Barbados, she and Hyacinth sat once a month while Jean creamed their hair, having observed a whole week of not scratching their
scalps and carefully combing their hair, a ritual and talk Phaedra wanted to be part of. Phaedra came home buzzing after the second of these visits, when she'd sat in Jean's front room watching television and saw the advertisement for Brother D's, a jewelry store in town: “Barbados Women Should Be in Chains. Brother D's Chains.” Before the ad went off, Phaedra noticed that they also did ear piercing. She gathered up courage to talk to Hyacinth during her best time, the late mornings when she had just finished working in her garden, and a sheen coated her face. This was the closest time she ever came to seeing her grandmother happy.

“Granny?”

“Yes, Phaedra.”

“When do you think I could pierce my ears?”

“Oh, I don't know, child. Why you in such a rush to bore holes in your ears?”

“It's just that the play is coming up and all the girls are going to be wearing gold earrings.”

“If all the girls went down to the careenage and jumped in the water, you would do that too?”

Phaedra shuddered at the thought of the green-gray, murky water against her skin. “No, ma'am. I just thought it would look nice, and be good for my role.”

“The Lord ain't studying what you wearing.” Hyacinth sat down to take off her gardening boots but was beat there by Phaedra, who squatted in the grass, pulled them off, and started massaging her grandmother's feet in a circular motion
that made Hyacinth throw back her head and say, “You know what to do, girl.”

“That feels nice, Gran?”

“Better than Christmas.”

Hyacinth let her shoulders drop back against the bench her husband made for her when they were still young and in love. Back then the house and her garden were as new to Hyacinth as she and her husband were to each other. He would come home in the afternoons for lunch and they'd make love for so long that he'd have to rush back to his work at the mechanic shop with his belly rumbling and his full lunch tin banging against his shin. He'd made the bench for Hyacinth because he said that she deserved a place where she could relax and admire God's work. She looked at the frangipani tree, whose fragrant flowers blanketed the ground. They were beautiful, but cleaning them up was a job that strained her back now. Hyacinth smiled to herself, knowing that her husband had made this house, this garden, this bench by hand so that she'd have something of him to hold on to when he was gone.

Hyacinth relaxed into Phaedra's touch and let her mind wander. Would Phaedra keep up the house when she was gone? Or would she and Dionne leave, like Avril, the first chance they got? She knew Dionne had a hot foot, but with Phaedra there was hope she'd stay. A couple days before Avril's funeral, Hyacinth showed the girls the safe where she kept her money, her most important papers, and the simple white
dress she wanted to wear to her funeral. She'd had to tell Dionne, who stood in the doorway with her fists at her waist and her lips pursed like she was sucking lemons, that if she thought death was something she could catch like a cold, she was more foolish than she'd already shown herself to be. It was Phaedra who sat down next to Hyacinth while she explained that the plot she wanted to be buried in was already paid for and then listed out the hymns she wanted to be sung at the memorial service. Hyacinth pinned her hope on the chance that Phaedra's steadiness might balance out her sister's hotheadedness, that the two of them would take care of each other after she was gone.

Hyacinth looked down at Phaedra kneading her feet. “OK, you little wretch. Don't think I don't see what you're doing. Give me time to go about my business today and then when evening comes, we'll see about you and your ears.”

“But Gran, don't the buses stop running into town after dark?”

“What we going in town for?”

“We're not going to Brother D's?”

Phaedra had imagined herself seated on a pink leather stool, careful to keep her elbows off the glass cases, smelling perfume on the lady who would take a gun to her ears while she sat valiantly still, no tears. Maybe her grandmother would let her try on one of those thick gold chains. Despite being a mostly sensible girl, Avril said, and it was true, that Phaedra had flashy taste like her father.

“Oh Lord, please deliver me from these Yankee children.”

“What happen, Granny?”

“You got Brother D's money?”

“No, Gran.”

“Right, then,” Hyacinth said, and pushed on the flip-flops Phaedra placed near her feet.

Evening came and Phaedra finished washing the supper dishes. She listened to the night frogs' song pulsing at the kitchen window and wondered what her grandmother was planning. She went to the front bedroom and saw Hyacinth sitting on the bed, rummaging through her sewing kit.

“You need help finding something?” Phaedra asked.

“I'm looking for a needle. You know Granny's eyes not so good anymore.”

“What do you need a needle for? I thought you said you were finished with the whole clothes-mending business.”

“You know, Phaedra, for being such a bright girl, sometimes it seems like you don't have too much sense knocking about in that head of yours.”

Phaedra was quiet. Over time, she'd come to accept her grandmother's way of serving insults and love together.

“I'm looking for a needle to pierce your ears.”

“Is that safe?” Phaedra had a flash of her mother, who she thought would be wary of this operation.

“You think I would do you anything?” Hyacinth asked.

“No, Gran,” Phaedra said. But Avril had told her to be careful of Hyacinth, past whom she would put nothing. Phaedra knew that the truth about her grandmother lay somewhere between her mother's occasionally venomous descriptions and
the sweet, hard woman she was getting to know. She picked out the best needle she could find, a short silver one that was unthreaded and, as far as she could tell, unused.

In the kitchen, Phaedra pulled the stool where she usually sat shelling peas or husking garlic, or sometimes just watching her grandmother stir the pots. Hyacinth lit the pilot and put the needle to the fire. She handed Phaedra ice cubes from the freezer and draped dish towels over her shoulders to catch the drip. Phaedra caught a glimpse of herself in the picture window, her hands clutching the ice over her extended earlobes.

“You have ears just like your mother,” Hyacinth said. When the needle was hot to her liking, she pulled it away from the flame. “Maybe you might be more able to hear with them when I'm talking to you than she was.”

Phaedra squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth when she felt the pressure of the needle and then the string pulling through her right ear. But she didn't cry, because she wanted her grandmother to think she was brave.